Real-world Performance

As we noted before, real-world performance between drives has little-to-no observable difference. However, benchmarking suites can throw an array of tasks at your SSD to simulate the benefits of a full day's-worth of usage, and by going through a large number of operations, performance differences become more apparent. What we did in the past was show the incredible difference a basic SSD will have over a mechanical drive. Take a peak at our real-world test against a mechanical drive HERE.

We found that when we'd time Windows boot-up times, there was more uncertainty in our timing measurements than the difference between the drives actually were. The same could be said with many other program load tests, however, Futuremark's PCMark 7 Professional allows you to throw an array of real-world tasks at the SSD, and it measures the performance during each task, and then makes three passes of the same test and averages the runs. The Storage Benchmarks ran through these various tests to measure the performance of the SSDs: Windows Defender AV Scan, importing pictures, video editing, Windows Media Center, adding music, gaming, and starting applications. The latter two are probably the most relevant, and in the benchmarks we saw the greatest variability between the SSDs in these two categories, so those are the ones we'll report. The combined score of all the runs across all category tasks is also reported.

As we can see in the real-world testing, the Wildfire and the Vertex 3 Max IOPS continue to trade punches, but OCZ's offering slightly edges out the Wildfire in the overall score, albeit by an essentially negligible margin. Both of these drives eclipse the 60GB Pryo by ~15%, consistent with what we've seen previously with the various synthetic benchmarks.